The road to Jerusalem, it has so often been said, runs through Cairo. Writing from a regime prison cell in the months after Palestine’s “unity intifada” of 2021, the Egyptian revolutionary Alaa Abd El-Fattah modified this historic injunction: “The road to Jerusalem looked like it ran through Cairo — but what is certain is that it must pass through Gaza. Jerusalem is not too proud to ask for Gaza’s help. Maybe Cairo should now show a little humility and do the same.”

Here we have a lyrical articulation of a simple political truth: that the freedom struggle of the Palestinian people and the wider fight for democracy in the Arab world are one and the same. Only through the violent suppression of popular sovereignty across the region have the military dictatorships, the petro-monarchs, and the settler-colonial project in Palestine survived.

As Alaa’s mediation suggests, this interconnected struggle is not one-way traffic, a matter of the Palestinians waiting for the Arab peoples to triumph over their autocratic rulers (American clients, more often than not). On the contrary, the Palestinian people often lead the way, generating space for struggle beyond the borders of their historic homeland, in places where the conditions of possibility for mass politics seem to have been crushed. A few weeks ago, it was a march in solidarity with the Palestinians of Gaza that saw Egyptian democrats surge back into Tahrir Square for the first time since the revolution.